The Fenian Ram

 Now there may be other people - like me and Angie - who have been watching episodes of the high-class Netflix hokum which is 'House of Guinness'. If you have been watching, then you can not have failed to come across the green-wearing rebels who are referred to throughout as 'Fenians'

Fenians was a general term for anyone in the pre-independence Ireland who agitated for Irish independence. Indeed my own grandmother was turned out of service in the early years of the last century for allegedly 'singing fenian songs down in the basement'. So it is used as term of abuse, a term of solidarity, but it was also in the name of an organised group of people called 'The Fenian Brotherhood'. 

You can go to Wikipedia for a full description here ( The Fenian Brotherhood) but essentially the 'Fenian Brotherhood' was an organisation founded in the US in 1858 and with the support from many Irish who had emigrated there after the great Famine of the 1840s, so they clearly had much motivation for wanting to remove British rule from their homeland. They also had funds.

Rather amazingly, the Fenian Brotherhood was funded enough to be able to plan for an actual invasion of Canada (!), which was of course then still a British colony. The idea was to use that threat as leverage to get Irish independence, and some raids did take place. The US government seemed to be not all that seriously trying to prevent this invasion because they themselves had many axes to grind to the government of the UK (who had, for example, helped the Confederates get around arms embargoes).

But to get back to the 'Fenian Ram'. The rather amazing fact (which thing I love to collect) is that the world's first viable, armed, modern submarine was funded by the Fenian Brotherhood! It was later nicknamed 'The Fenian Ram' by newspapers, but it was not at all to be mocked or looked down on. Let me explain.

John Philip Holland (1841-1914) was an Irish marine engineer and inventor, from Liscannor in County Clare. He grew up in a heavily Irish-speaking area, and therefore only learned English really when he went to school. This did not stop him thinking - as a teenager and young man - of how one could make a submarine that actually worked.

He ended up in the US, teaching, but continuing his experiments and designs and had by the late 1870s come up with the principles that underly all modern submarines (essentially using horizontal planes to stay submerged, rather than just taking on ballast as all previous models had). He also produced an effective armament to give it teeth; a six-feet long, nine-inch wide steel tube full of dynamite. It was very much like a modern torpedo and was launched by compressed air. The submarine was powered by a kerosene engine. 

The Fenian Brotherhood funded the construction and therefore ended up with a totally usable weapon that could have sank British ships as they planned. However, unsurprisingly, there were many schisms within such an organisation and the Brotherhood fell out with Holland and eventually stole the vessel. 

Now I was quite prepared to find out that it had been sold for scrap, but was very pleased to find that this did not happen, and through various changes of hands it can now be viewed in a museum in Patterson, New Jersey. That photo at the top is the vessel as it is today.

And as for Holland? Well the US government did finally realise that he had produced something that had a future (and of course now ICBM-armed submarines hold all our futures in their power), so they funded Holland to build the first US submarine which was, appropriately enough, called the USS Holland.

Unfortunately, Holland himself did not end up rich, although he had set the world on track for an enormous new area of technology. And I think he did not do badly for a young Irish-speaker from down in Liscannor.